Kenner Products

• 1. Introduction

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  Kenner Products almost never got the chance to build Star Wars toys at all. In 1976, the Mego Corporation turned down the license to make figures based on the film, and Kenner took it instead. That single rejection turned a modest toy company into the maker of one of the most famous toy lines in history. Kenner went on to build merchandise for Jurassic Park and Batman as well, all while its corporate ownership shifted from one company to the next. How did a business built on ovens, bubbles, and building sets end up steering some of the biggest franchises in pop culture? Why does its name no longer sit on toy store shelves? The chapters ahead follow Kenner from its founding through the moments that made it famous. They also trace the end of its run as an independent name.

• 2. Cincinnati Origins

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  Three brothers, Albert, Philip, and Joseph L. Steiner, founded the company in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1946. They named it after the street where their original offices stood, just north of the Cincinnati Union Terminal.

  Beginning in 1958, Kenner became one of the earliest toy companies to advertise its products on national television. In 1962, the company introduced a corporate mascot, the Kenner Gooney Bird, alongside the slogan "It's Kenner! It's fun!"

  In 1968, Kenner commissioned Muppets creator Jim Henson to build an advertisement for the Easy-Bake Oven, with the Gooney Bird appearing as a puppet. The following year, that same puppet was repurposed into Little Bird, a character on Sesame Street. The Gooney Bird itself faded from Kenner's advertising by 1974.

  Its mascot had run its course, but the toys crowding shelves throughout the 1950s and 1960s were only getting started.

• 3. A Toy Chest of Originals

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  A toy gun called the Bubble-Matic, one of Kenner's very first products, blew bubbles instead of firing anything. An updated version of the toy remained on shelves at least into the mid-1960s.

  In 1957, Kenner introduced the Girder and Panel building sets, a construction toy line. Two years later, in 1959, came the Give-a-Show Projector, followed by the Easy-Bake Oven and the Electric Mold Master, both released in 1963.

  The Spirograph drawing toy arrived in 1966. More than two decades later, in 1988, Kenner launched Starting Lineup, a line of sports action figure collectibles.

  These homegrown inventions gave Kenner a foothold years before any single blockbuster franchise came calling.

• 4. A Chain of Owners

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  General Mills purchased Kenner in 1967, folding the small Cincinnati toymaker into a far larger food company. Four years later, in 1971, General Mills merged its Rainbow Crafts division into Kenner, bringing the Play-Doh brand into Kenner's lineup.

  In 1985, General Mills spun off both Kenner and Parker Brothers to form a new company called Kenner Parker Toys, Inc. The following year, Kenner Parker sold off its Lionel Trains division.

  Tonka acquired Kenner Parker in 1987, and under Tonka's management, Kenner Products continued on as a division rather than an independent company. Tonka itself, Kenner included, was purchased by the toy company Hasbro in mid-1991.

  Hasbro closed Kenner's Cincinnati offices in 2000, folding its product lines directly into Hasbro's own. The Kenner name stopped appearing on new toy packaging, though the characters it built its reputation on were far from finished.

• 5. The Star Wars License

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  Kenner held the rights to make Star Wars action figures and playsets from 1976 through 1985, covering the entire original trilogy. Popularizing the 3.75 inch action figure, Kenner set a size standard that the rest of the toy industry would follow for decades.

  Beyond Star Wars, Kenner also produced toys tied to the 1970s TV series The Six Million Dollar Man and the 1979 science fiction film Alien. In 1981, Kenner entered the die cast toy car market for the first time, launching a short-lived range called Fast 111's.

  The 1980s also brought Fashion Star Fillies, a line of model horses that was discontinued before the decade ended. Star Wars would not be the only franchise where Kenner reworked a license into something distinctly its own.

• 6. Super Powers Collection

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  Superman's legs, when squeezed together, made the figure throw a punch, one of many built-in actions in Kenner's Super Powers Collection. Produced in 1984-1986, the line was based on DC Comics superheroes and closely followed the company's official style guide for each character's look.

  Kenner commissioned certain comic book creators to design figures of characters they had made themselves. Jack Kirby designed his own New Gods characters, and George Pérez designed Cyborg.

  In 1985, DC Comics recognized Kenner's work on the line. It named the company one of the honorees in its 50th anniversary publication, Fifty Who Made DC Great.

  That same faithfulness to the source material would not survive intact in Kenner's next major action figure line.

• 7. Breaking From the Blueprint

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  The Real Ghostbusters toy line launched in 1986, the same year an animated series adapting the 1984 film Ghostbusters began. That series ran through 1991, and Kenner's toys stayed in production through most of its run.

  The Real Ghostbusters' early figures closely resembled the cartoon's character designs, though that fidelity did not last. Kenner soon began designing original costumes, weapons, and ghost characters that never appeared in the show or its comics. Many of these built around unique action features similar to Mattel's competing Masters of the Universe line, and to Kenner's own earlier Super Powers toys.

  Star Wars, Marvel Comics, and DC Comics represented one older approach to toy design, closely mirroring an established franchise. The other approach was to invent original characters, then produce comics and cartoons to promote them. Hasbro did this with G.I. Joe and Transformers, and Mattel did it with Masters of the Universe. Kenner had no arrangement to feed its new Real Ghostbusters concepts back into the cartoon or comic books, unlike those two established models.

  Kenner carried this same looser approach into its Dark Knight Collection, launched in 1990 as the first of many toy lines built around Batman. Riding on the success of the 1989 Batman film, the line included vehicles like the Batmobile and the Batplane. Kenner later added vehicles from the 1995 film Batman Forever.

  Later Batman lines moved beyond the films entirely, drawing on the character's animated series and comic book incarnations. Kenner went on to build similar lines around Superman and other DC Comics characters. Most of these DC lines featured multi-colored costumes, weapons, and action features that were not based directly on any storyline. Character names and likenesses, though, stayed accurate to the source.

  Mattel continued this same design philosophy after it took over the DC Comics toy license. Its lines drew on the films Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and Superman Returns, as well as the Justice League cartoons. Hasbro, which eventually bought Kenner, used a similar approach on its own lines. Its 2010 3.75 inch Spider-Man action figures and some of its 2009 G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra products stand out as examples.

  Not every gamble paid off the way Batman and Ghostbusters had, and one particular franchise would prove far harder to sustain.

• 8. From Shutdown to Vintage Collection

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  In 1998, Kenner released the Jurassic Park: Chaos Effect toy line, but sales came in well below expectations. A planned follow-up, the Night Hunter series, was scrapped in 1999 after the poor sales made a second wave unworkable.

  Jurassic Park had become more of a nuisance to Hasbro than a dependable trademark, and the timing made things worse. Hasbro had also overproduced toys for Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. The resulting combination of low sales and excess inventory forced the company to downsize its Cincinnati operation.

  100 employees were transferred elsewhere in Hasbro, while 420 more were laid off. Among them was Kenner's Jurassic Park design team, the same designers behind Batman among other lines. That design team had only just begun early concepts for Jurassic Park III when the layoffs hit.

  Hasbro reassigned those unfinished toys to its Star Wars design team. That team rescaled the human figures to match Star Wars proportions. They styled the toys to resemble figures from Star Wars: Attack of the Clones.

  In 2010, Hasbro began releasing modern Star Wars figures packaged to resemble Kenner's original 1978-1984 Star Wars line. This line, Star Wars: The Vintage Collection, featured newly designed, highly pose-able figures with screen-accurate likenesses.

  Hasbro had tried similar nostalgia releases twice before, with the 2004 Original Trilogy Collection and the 2006-2007 Saga Collection, both marketed as vintage-style lines. It was the first time Hasbro dedicated an entire Star Wars toy line to replicas of Kenner's original carded figures. That packaging design now carries the brand's earliest look into a new generation of collectors.